Brands love hashtags. Many don’t understand them, but that doesn’t stop them. They’ll hashtag anything, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. I like to look at a hashtag as the social media equivalent of a camp fire story.

Something people can connect with, something that invites the continuation of a story or perhaps even starts a new one.

Getting it right is tough. Especially if you’re a brand. Many make the foolish mistake of thinking a hashtag has to be about the brand to deliver any value. Others think you can make it about an irrelevant strapline no one cares about. Others, like Nike, absolutely 110% get it.

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Corrupt, sneaky, unfair and bloody hard work… no, I’m not talking about refereeing a professional football match here, I’m talking about running an online social media competition.

To make it in the social media space these days, you have to give something back to the consumer.

Be that incredible content you just can’t get enough of, an addictive game people can’t stop tapping away on… or some incredibly exclusive prizes that are part of a competition.

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Google+ (Search Plus Your World) is over a year into its life and most of us are still wondering exactly where it’s positioned in the market. Google are notoriously anti-competitive and as a publisher, it kind of feels like we’re being bullied into finding a use for it as a service. This is an ironic twist for me as I commented earlier last year that it was social media commentators picking on the search giants 19th foray into the social space.

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Pinterest has been going into hyper drive of late. Everyone is keen to extoll the virtues of the new social network. The hyperbole is quite unbelievable. It’s the new place to hang out, share pictures and project a lifestyle you’d like to have. I like it, it’s fun, but I can’t help but think there will come a point when the excitement will die down and you’ll realise that it’s just sharing pictures.

There are a few reasons why I think it might not turn into a Facebook type monster. They’re all conjecture and based on my own personal experience of the site, but I thought I’d share them anyway… Read more »

So I’ve had this inkling for a while. It goes a little something like this…

What your friends like does not have a massive impact on your purchasing decisions

I know, I know… it’s a hugely outspoken thing to say. After all, Facebook have dictated to everyone in the marketing world that people are hugely influenced by what their friends eat, wear, listen to and watch. Sponsored stories; the advertising function Facebook advertisers use to tell people what their friends have liked, is supposed to be hugely powerful to anyone who wants to believe it.

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A few weeks ago I wrote a story about LinkedIn and their aggressive approach in turning their platform into Temptation Island when it came to moving jobs. My ire was drawn from all the fabulous new ways they’ve conjured up to move jobs. Clever display adverts that put my head under a fancy job title, jobs I might be interested in floating down my newsfeed and a daily digest of jobs I might like on a weekly basis, usually at my weakest on a Monday.

The post had quite a lot of interest from business owners, to recruitment consultants to, would you believe it, LinkedIn themselves. They got in touch and wanted the chance to explain their vision and why my view, though valid, might have different facets unconsidered in the original piece.

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What is influence? It’s a massive question in the world of social media. Thousands of man hours are being pumped into companies who are trying to solve the problem in the hope that one day, you’ll be able to search a category and an application will spit out exactly the 5 top influencers you need to be communicating with to push your product.
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Social media has clunked its way through many evolutions over the years. The past four has seen the digital world settle into a social rhythm. Facebook being the daddy of them all, Twitter is the cooler, younger kid on the block, and LinkedIn taking the lead as the place to hang out to talk serious stuff. The commonality with all of those platforms is they are essentially for everyone. The barriers to entry are extremely low. Most tech savvy people will generally have those three, even if they’re not active in all three (I bet everyone who reads this has all three).

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Facebook insights. Dear oh dear. I’ve got to come out and say it – I’ve found their new and “improved” suite of analytics entirely perplexing, lacking in usefulness and extremely complex to explain, aggregate and apply to the real world.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in the industry who has been using the old Insights page to report back successes to clients. I’ve been living in hope that they’ll never switch it off , but the time has come – the old insights page is still an option, but it’s not recording new data. I haven’t felt this down since I said goodbye to my Bebo account…

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In the world of B2B, there is no doubt that LinkedIn is king. It’s a fantastic place to cultivate contacts, develop new ones, show off your business knowledge in a brash self-indulgent way and potentially win new business leads. It’s also been a pretty clever way of searching for jobs and it’s a  great way for a multitude of recruitment consultants to access your details and contact you for a ‘chat’.

Things were fine with LinkedIn and business. Employees went on there and pushed their personal brand by imparting their wisdom, this in turn benefited companies because those employees were acting as brand ambassadors which could help generate leads. Everyone was a winner. Read more »